On Dec. 19, 2009, a Fordham staff member discovered all four study lounges in McMahon Hall had been vandalized, resulting in the closing of all lounges until the beginning of the spring semester in January of 2010.

McMahon Hall has study lounges on the fifth, eighth, 14th, and 17th floors. The eighth floor lounge acts as a recreational facility with a ping-pong table, a foosball table, and a television, while the 17th floor exists as a silent study environment. The study lounges are available to all resident students, 24 hours a day.

Jenifer Campbell, director of Residential Life for Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC), described the vandalism incident; “There were some chairs that were thrown out of the window onto the tennis court. [The vandal(s)] had stripped the mechanism to keep the window in place and [the vandal(s)] were able to get the chairs out. We had to get those repaired.” According to Campbell, five chairs in total (four side chairs and one stool model chair) were thrown from the windows of the fifth and 14th floor lounges.

Other damages included displaced furniture and spray painted graffiti on the fifth, 14th, and 17th floor study lounges, consisting of expressions such as, “General Disarray strikes again” (written on a table and a wall), “Professor Chaos + General Disarray 4 eva,” “This is [expletive],” and “WTF?!” Professor Chaos and General Disarray are bumbling mischief-makers on the Comedy Central program South Park.

Campbell said it was decided between her and security to close the lounges on Dec. 19, the day the damages were discovered.

“Since we have such limited staff in the building over the Christmas holiday, I decided at that point we would close the lounges until after we got back from the winter break,” she said.

The study lounges were closed in the midst of final examinations, leaving students still in the residence hall without a 24-hour public study area. Though students had access to Quinn Library, its facilities were only available until 7 p.m. on Dec. 19, and from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. on Dec. 20 through the end of examinations on Dec. 22.

McMahon Hall resident Angelina Meloi, FCLC ’12, had to find an alternative place to study for her finals. She said, “I wound up studying back in my room. [The library] was distracting; there was no place to sit, all of the tables were completely taken.”

Alanna Parisi, FCLC ’12, said that the vandalism was “immaturity at its finest.

“It was selfish, especially during finals week. You’re going to inhibit other people from studying because you have something to prove by wrecking the study lounge? Be intelligent; don’t be a jerk,” she said.

Neither Residential Life nor security was able to identify a possible culprit. Campbell said, “We were working with security to try to find individuals, but there was nothing evident in terms of traffic in the hallway where it’s visible with cameras and things of that nature.” She speculated, “Honestly, I think it was someone who was leaving the residence hall, potentially a judicial situation, but we’ve never had anything in my tenure here that even came close to this.”

Prior to this incident, Campbell said there had not been many instances of vandalism in the study lounges.

“There might have been the kind of thing where someone might go pull off information from the bulletin board, but nothing egregious like this.” She said, “We don’t have vandalism, per se, in McMahon Hall, so that’s why it was so surprising.”

When asked about preventing vandalism in the future, Campbell said, “We’re basically monitoring it with staff visibility and things of that nature—having conversations at floor meetings, about the detriment and the effect on the community. We’re not at a point where we need cameras.”

Cricket Beeson, FCLC ’12 and public relations representative for the McMahon Resident Hall Association (RHA). She said, “RHA is very distraught about this. [Residential Life] will probably do floor meetings, and they might do a general meeting or event about respecting McMahon, and we would be a part of that. We would probably be a part of replacing things in the lounges.”

According to RHA treasurer Matt Ortiz, FCLC ’12, “We’re replacing study lounge property [with money that] would have to come from the RHA’s capital improvements budget, ultimately taking away from other projects RHA could have been investing in, such as adding new artwork to the 14th floor lounge and replacing the non-functioning television in the eighth floor lounge.”

RHA senator Michelle Panzironi, FCLC ’12, said, “We were always talking about revamping the lounges and now what’s the point if someone is going to vandalize them? We’re going to be hesitant in putting nice, newer things in there.”